


Ignite

by foolishgames



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 12:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2387894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolishgames/pseuds/foolishgames
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The third time Pepper sets the bed on fire in her sleep, she wakes shivering, doused in foam. Tony’s perched on the dresser with his legs tucked up and his chin on his knees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignite

The third time Pepper sets the bed on fire in her sleep, she wakes shivering, doused in foam. Tony’s perched on the dresser with his legs tucked up and his chin on his knees. There’s a small fire extinguisher next to him, unused: Jarvis had got this one, then.

“Fuck,” says Pepper, clearly and thoughtfully, once her heart has stopped racing.

“Yep,” says Tony, hopping gingerly down. Jarvis helpfully brings up the lights, and she sees how pale he is.

“Did I get you?”

“Nah,” he says. “Wasn’t sleeping. I was working.” Behind him, she can see a tablet on the dresser, still shining. There’s ink on his temples, even though Tony Stark hasn’t used anything so plebian as a pen in years.

She hesitates, but he doesn’t go on, just stares at the scorched sheets, looking anxious and unsteady. “I’m gonna clean up,” she says, because the flame retardant foam dries tacky and smells awful. Tony nods.

She’s long since disabled the safety limits on water temperature in their suite, though she’s always careful to switch it back to normal settings after she’s done so Tony won’t absentmindedly poach himself. It comes out barely shy of boiling, and hisses away to steam when it touches her skin. The foam sluices off, leaving bare pink skin behind, a faint tracery of hectic hot gold beneath. She nudges the temperature controls lower, lower, letting herself shiver even though it’s still fatally hot by human standards. A little lower. Her breath comes deep and easy now, and she can feel the fire under her skin settling into something cool and ready.

Tony’s remaking the bed when she comes out; he’s stripped away the scorched sheets and is staring helplessly around the room as if he’s expecting a fresh set of linens to appear out of thin air. “I don’t think I can fix this,” he says.

“We can just sleep down the hall,” says Pepper. “There’s plenty of rooms.”

“Not the sheets,” says Tony, in that sudden, irritable way he sometimes has. “Not the - you, Pep. I don’t think I can fix you.”

She swallows. Last week, in a fit of irritation, she’d melted a pair of trousers right to her skin. The fire responds to her mood, sometimes. “You stabilised it,” she says. “I won’t explode, right? You said I won’t explode.”

“You won’t.” He frowns. “I’m pretty sure. Caveat, I’m not actually a molecular biologist. But you haven’t exploded yet, so that’s… good.”

“I don’t feel like I’m going to explode,” she says.

“But I can’t fix you,” he says plaintively. “I want to make you better.”

Pepper sighs and crosses to the dresser to retrieve a fresh set of pyjamas. She carefully doesn’t grind her teeth, and pays attention to her hands so she doesn’t break the furniture. “Did you ever consider asking about what I want?” she says, once she’s sure she has control of her voice. “Because I feel like that’s something you might want to consider in this crusade.”

When she faces him, tugging the soft shirt down over her belly, he’s wide-eyed and wounded looking. “You don’t want to be fixed?”

She frowns at him. “You were literally walking around with a chest full of shrapnel and a tiny radioactive reactor taking up a third of your lung capacity for five years, Tony. Out of sheer bullheadedness. You have no room to talk.”

“It wasn’t radioactive,” he mutters sullenly. Abruptly fed up, she points a stern finger at the pile of already-scorched sheets. They catch fire again, and Tony yelps and scrambles for the extinguisher.

“You,” she says furiously, “have been so busy trying to make me normal again you haven’t even made a single ‘smoking hot’ pun. Not in months.”

“I was just trying to help?” he says, wreathed in smoke. “I’m sorry?”

“Help by designing a fabric that won’t burn right off me when I’m dealing with idiots,” she says. “I’ve ruined three dresses in the last month.”

"I,” he says. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Good.” They stare at each other across the wreckage of their bedroom, Pepper’s anger fading as fast as it had swelled.

The corner of Tony’s mouth twitches.

“You can set things on fire with your brain,” he says. His tone is reverent.

“It’s more like a very compressed, extremely focussed, um, beam. Of heat.” She winces.

“That is so hot,” says Tony helplessly. “Pepper, that is literally and also figuratively the hottest thing I have ever heard.” He flings aside the fire extinguisher and grabs at his own hair. “Pepper, Pep, I have months to catch up on. Months. How far can your heat powers go? Do they get less effective further away? Pepper, can you breathe fire? I have missed so many heat-related jokes, damn it.”

“I can breathe fire,” she allows. “But it ruins my makeup.”

“We have to go to the lab right now,” he says. “Oh my god.”

He seizes her hand and pulls her to the door. She considers scolding him, considers flatly refusing; it’ll do neither of them any good to spend what’s left of the night blowing things up and writing down the results, especially since Tony hasn’t been sleeping. Instead she tugs him to a stop and presses him against the living room wall. With both of them barefoot, she’s got an inch or so on him, and he shivers and tilts his head back just a fraction when she kisses him, just a small sweet surrender.

“Ah, shit,” he mumbles. She snickers. “Pepper. How strong are you now?”

“I said I was sorry about the car,” she says. The door had come off in her hand with an awful noise, and the shape of her fingers had been crushed into the handle. At least it had happened in the garage, not in public. “Stronger than you,” she adds, taking his wrists very gently. She won’t hurt him.

“Yes, obviously,” he says, and swallows. “We should run some tests.” His breath hitches when she bites softly at the line of his jaw.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “We should do that tomorrow.” Because she’s willing to indulge him, but not tonight.

“Okay,” he says, and she lets a little heat flare through her palms, escape in her breath, and Tony makes a frantic noise and squirms, but she holds him in place. “Shit, Pepper. God.”

“Come to bed,” she says, and he nods, fast and breathless.

“Yeah, yes, okay, don’t think I don’t know you’re manipulating me,” he says, following her to the spare bedroom.

“I know,” she says. “Hey, watch this.”

A visible flame takes concentration, but Pepper’s been practicing. In the dim light of the bedroom, her fingertips trail off into shining streaks of electric blue, her palms spitting white-hot, the sleeves of her nightshirt curling back from the intense heat.

Tony leans in until his eyebrows singe, his expression delighted and greedy, and Pepper lets herself burn.


End file.
